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The year is 1962, and ad exec Martin K. Speckter has a punctuation problem.

Madison Avenue is debating the merits of a streamlined new European import called Helvetica. Roy Lichtenstein’s filling canvases with comic book characters and hand-painted typefaces. Andy Warhol’s cranking out Campbell’s soup cans in The Factory. Art is becoming commerce and commerce, art.

Meanwhile, JFK’s in office, the Vietnam War’s escalating, and The Pill’s finally received FDA approval. What’s needed is a typographically elegant way to notate surprise, disbelief, and incredulous excitement. For a single symbol to punctuate sentences like “Who’s that?!” and “What the hell?!”

Speckter’s solution? The interrobang. A stylish fusion of the question mark (that’s the “interro” part) and the exclamation point (known in old-timey typesetter’s slang as the “bang”), his unusual new creation looked like this:
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The sassy typographical newcomer was to become something of a pop culture phenomenon during the 1960s, and today often draws comparisons to the bygone craze for Esperanto. It received write-ups in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Herald Tribune, and Time magazine. It found lasting validation in the crisp new pages of American dictionaries, and a more fleeting embodiment in the hard steel keys of a few Remington Rand typewriters and some Smith-Corona accessories manufactured in the day. The interrobang’s creator gave interviews with Dick Cavett and Barbara Walters. Marshall McLuhan wrote about it. Interrabang?! even became the title of a racy Italian movie in 1969. Man and punctuation mark were the talk of the town. And then?

Readers, have you seen any good interrobangs lately? Somewhere along the way, this double-barreled typographical starlet lost its momentum and found its way into the “Where Are They Now?” file.

To remedy this, I sat down with Penny Speckter, the 92-year-old widow of the mark’s creator, to talk about her memories of her husband, his passion for typography, and about her own experiences as a woman working in the heady world of advertising during the Mad Men era.

We met in an East Village Italian restaurant close to her apartment. It was a rainy day and she carried a clear plastic umbrella with a deep dome. She remarked wryly that she needed it “to protect the superstructure,” meaning her carefully styled strawberry blonde hair shaped into a gravity-defying Ann Landers flip. Her voice is rich and resonant. Radio-ready. Full of authority and purpose tempered with mischief and warmth.

Before we began talking, she wanted to show me a few items she thought I “might get a buzz from”: an interrobang key from a Remington Rand typewriter mounted on a clear plexiglass stand, a copy of her husband’s 1971 typographical treatise Disquistion on the Composing Stick, a gold interrobang pin she’s clipped to the cuff of her blazer, as well as an issue of the newsletter she currently writes and edits for The General Society of Mechanics & Tradesmen.

The Millions: The interrobang turns 50 this year. But its popularity has dropped off considerably since the 1960s. Why should we care about it in 2012?

Penny Speckter: This is an election year. I can’t tell you how many times while watching the Republican debates on television that I thought to myself, “What did he just say?!”

TM: What’s your favorite sentence using an interrobang?

PS: “Who forgot to put gas in the car?!” which is not a question.

TM: Major publications like the Wall Street Journal gave the interrobang positive press. And it’s been recognized by American dictionaries such Webster’s. But it seems like your husband’s creation has had its share of detractors too. In her bestselling book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss calls the interrobang “a newfangled and rather daft symbol” and says the name “has the overtones of a police interview terminating in an explosion.” Do you have any comment on this?

PS: Well, that same gal gave a radio interview once where she said the reason the interrobang never caught on was because Martin wanted a royalty. That’s absolutely untrue. The whole idea was to make it ubiquitous. I think she just said what she thought would be fun and expedient.

TM: Okay, so that was one woman’s opinion in 2003. Were there many critics of the interrobang in, say, 1963?

PS: The objection in the beginning was there was no place in the type case for it. And then other people said, well, if you produced it in lead type, it would be useful for a few jobs, but then what do you do with it? The character would always have to be hand-drawn.

TM: This was long before word-processors.

PS: Yes. Everything’s different now with computers. Writing, editing, printing. We don’t know how lucky we are.

TM: So people loved the idea in 1962, but just weren’t sure how to handle the execution. When did that change?

PS: In 1966, American Type Founders (ATF) cast a new typeface called Americana. And a big selling point was it had this interrobang. It was a modern punctuation mark.

TM: And there were typewriters featuring it too?

PS: Yes. Remington Rand made some.

TM: You and your husband both worked in advertising in NYC during the time the television series Mad Men is set. Does the show’s depiction of that world ring true for you?

PS: I read an article recently by a woman [Jane Maas, author of Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ’60s and Beyond] who said she lived it. Well, I lived it too. Not in our agency. Things were pretty tame and there was no hanky panky. We were a small firm and I guess Martin and I set the tone for the people there. But for strategic reasons we folded Speckter Associates into another big agency in 1969. Then, Martin had a rough heart attack and a later incident which caused me to really push him into retirement. I moved a few of our accounts to another large agency that I’m not going to name, and continued to work with them there. But I gotta tell you, everything in Mad Men, even in the 70s, it was happening. It sure didn’t stop.

TM: As well as running an ad agency, your husband was also the editor for Type Talks, a trade publication put out by The Advertising Typographers Association of America. Could you tell us more about his interest in typography?

PS: Martin’s passion for it went all the way back to high school. He was the editor of his school’s paper – one of the very few dailies in a secondary school – and he loved designing a page, choosing an appropriate typeface, and locking it into the form. Martin loved doing things with his hands. Maybe most writers do. Over the years, his passion for movable type and the history of printing led him to collect a formidable assortment of small printing presses and antique metal types. After we moved to New York, he established the Four Penny Press in our apartment kitchen. We eventually rented a separate apartment across the hall for all our printing toys. We called it “the Bodoni apartment.”

TM: Bodoni?

PS: After the typeface.

TM: Do you still have the Bodoni apartment?

PS: No, I had to give it up after Martin died in 1988. He had collected so much stuff and things had gotten out of control. There were boxes to the ceiling. It all took about five months to get through. It was overwhelming, but it did keep me busy.

TM: Do you remember the day he first came up with the idea for the interrobang?

PS: All I know is Martin had 16 pages to fill every other month in Type Talks. We were having dinner one night and I said something and it sparked the idea. So we went back to the office, as we often did, and Martin sat down and did a draft of the article.

TM: So you were a collaborator?

PS: No. In those days, I wrote nothing. I would look at him and say, “You don’t want me to struggle with this condolence note, do you?” [laughs]

TM: But today you write and produce a newsletter. And I understand you’re working on a book. What changed?

PS: When I was growing up, my dad said, “You can be a secretary or a teacher.” I didn’t want to be either, but I ended up going to secretarial school. Then something lucky happened. When I was 19, I got this job with Red Cross. It was a better education because it pushed me into fundraising, which is what I did even when I came to New York. When I did finally go to college, I didn’t have to take any entrance exams. I was 56 by then. All they wanted to know was whether I could pay for the tuition. But I graduated top in my class and that’s how I found out I could write. It was a real ego trip. [laughs] I then went on to get my Masters in history. I just sat in a chair and I did it. I gotta tell you, though, I couldn’t have hacked it at 19. Somehow or other you can get motivated later on in life.

“It is sad to think people are no longer learning how to use the colon…” muses grammarian Lynne Truss in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, “not least because, in this supreme QWERTY keyboard era, the little finger of the human right hand, deprived of its traditional function, may eventually dwindle and drop off from disuse.”

Wherever you are, Ms. Truss, you may smile.

Sampling a single week in April from the New York Times, colon use appears both rampant and revisionary.

As Thomas Friedman says, “You’ve heard that saying: As General Motors goes, so goes America.”

Because these aren’t Ms. Truss’s colons. The colons of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, are brittle, dusty, soporific. “Prepare yourself,” they yawn, “that I may shortly provide you a list.” To actually call these colons by name (syntactical-deductive, appositive, etc.) is to virtually lose consciousness. So bear with me for a moment as we first rechristen our colons.

Most of us stop with number 1. At the other end of the spectrum is number 4, the juxtaposer, which has been variously replaced by periods (correctly), commas (incorrectly), dashes (who knows?), and semicolons (for the writing class or the bored).

But, as seen above, colons 2 and 3 are experiencing a renaissance. Their use is even verging on the decadent. (Doubters, try Charles M. Blow’s “A Mighty Pale Tea” or Kristof’s “A Church Mary Can Love,” also from that same week in April.)

Nor does it stop there.

I would like to hypothesize that a new form of colon has emerged. From the democratic bowels of the Internet, an unknown pair of beady black eyes is staring out at us.

It’s colon number 5.

At The New York Times, Roger Cohen certainly uses it. “Not history but the future: Germany, when I lived there in the late 1990s….” Or here, when he writes, “On Turkey, for example: Barack tells me Turkey is Europe’s Islamic bridge.”

Also a fan is Paul Krugman. “Some background: we used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises….” Or again, adding, “And one more thing: employment-based health insurance….”

A new colon is on the march. For now let’s call it the “jumper colon”.

For grammarians, it’s a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.

(Yikes.)

For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you’d be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.

(Breathe.)

See how fast that goes? The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences–Hemingway?–it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused–Faulkner?–it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose.

The best use of a jumper colon (and both Cohen and Krugman appear to agree) is to wedge it in at the very beginning of a paragraph, where it lends a little springboard action to that paragraph-to-paragraph waterfall effect.

As Mr. Kristof declares, “Memo to Mr. Obama: When a man who has been charged with crimes against humanity tells the world that America is in his pocket….”

Now let’s turn to the “Curiosities” page here at The Millions.

“News for young readers and their parents: Meet the charming and irrepressible….”

“For those who just can’t get enough of Carrie Bradshaw, Candace Bushnell’s latest: The Carrie Diaries.”

“At McSweeney’s: ‘A GREAT JOB OPPORTUNITY!’”

These aren’t spot-picks, but were rather taken from that same week in April as every example above.

Take a look around. Slate, The New Republic, The Huffington Post, Salon.com, The Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Vogue, The New Yorker, WIRED–all use jumper colons. Though not yet in the The AP Stylebook, they have slipped unnoticed into the vaunted realm of AP journalism.

So why is our writing suddenly peppered with colons? And where on earth did they come from?

Well, because the Internet is a place where things tend to go “viral.” Videos, songs, funny pictures of cats, forwarded emails, bad jokes–any information that can be transmitted digitally has the potential to snowball.

So, too, with words and acronyms. Have you ever told a friend you’d BRB? Ever LOL’d at a “FAIL”? If not, your child probably has. These words and clusters didn’t exist in the early nineties, yet for the “text gen” they’re common currency. And, IMHO, they’re also tied to colons.

Ms. Truss, herself, held the clue to this development.

A professed loather of emoticons, she worried they were indicative of our staggering ignorance of appropriate colon usage in standard English. “What’s this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for?” she feigns. “Well, if you look at it sideways, it could be a set of eyes.”

Yet isn’t it fair to wonder if our various smileys :), frowns :(, kisses :*, et al. haven’t warmed up that long-disused key, prepared it for the trickle-up effect into blogs and real-time journalism? Or whether compression typing (Twitter, texting) hasn’t set the stage for the dependent-clause communication that requires a jumper colon?

It’s Twitter and texting that deserve a second glance.

For it has been in response to imposed word-caps–140 characters for Twitter, 160 for texting–that the “text gen” has changed its writing style. To those texters/Twitterers out there, how many times have you performed ad hoc surgery on a message to make it “fit”? The logic game played daily is one of content v. concision.

And, as evidenced in The New York Times and elsewhere, the punctuation push has indeed gone upward. In comments, threads, emails, blogs, newspapers, and magazines, compelling jumpers abound.

For, as it turns out, our right-hand pinkie isn’t dying. It is in fact more dexterous than ever.

With the right computing capacity, one might even be able to divide word-count by colons for the entire World Wide Web and chart their proliferation over time. If anyone has a Cray supercomputer lying around, please email me.

Better yet, go write an email. See if you can avoid the allure of the jumper colon.